Moving Pictures

pleaded. “I’m really not that kind of person but you did say and I’ve walked all this way and I haven’t got any money and I’m hungry and I’ll do anything you’ve got. Anything at all. Please .”
    Silverfish looked at him doubtfully.
    “Even acting?” he said.
    “Pardon?”
    “Moving about and pretending to do things,” said Silverfish helpfully.
    “Yes!”
    “Seems a shame, a bright, well-educated lad like you,” said Silverfish. “What do you do?”
    “I’m studying to be a w—,” Victor began. He remembered Silverfish’s antipathy toward wizardry, and corrected himself, “a clerk.”
    “A waclerk?” said Silverfish.
    “I don’t know if I’d be any good at acting, though,” Victor confessed.
    Silverfish looked surprised. “Oh, you’ll be OK,” he said. “It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures.”
    He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a dollar coin.
    “Here,” he said, “go and get something to eat.”
    He looked Victor up and down.
    “Are you waiting for something?” he said.
    “Well,” said Victor, “I was hoping you could tell me what’s going on.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “A couple of nights ago I watched your, your click ,” he felt slightly proud of remembering the term, “back in the city and suddenly I wanted to be here more than anything else. I’ve never really wanted anything in my life before!”
    Silverfish’s face broke into a relieved grin.
    “Oh, that,” he said. “That’s just the magic of Holy Wood. Not wizard’s magic,” he added hastily, “which is all superstition and mumbo-jumbo. No. This is magic for ordinary people. Your mind is fizzing with all the possibilities. I know mine was,” he added.
    “Yes,” said Victor uncertainly. “But how does it work?”
    Silverfish’s face lit up.
    “You want to know?” he said. “You want to know how things work?”
    “Yes, I—”
    “You see, most people are so disappointing,” Silverfish said. “You show them something really wonderful like the picture box, and they just go ‘oh.’ They never ask how it works. Mr. Bird!”
    The last word was a shout. After a while a door opened on the far side of the shack and a man appeared.
    He had a picture box on a strap around his neck. Assorted tools hung from his belt. His hands were stained with chemical and he had no eyebrows, which Victor was later to learn was a sure sign of someone who had been around octo-cellulose for any length of time. He also had his cap on back to front.
    “This is Gaffer Bird,” beamed Silverfish. “Our head handleman. Gaffer, this is Victor. He’s going to act for us.”
    “Oh,” said Gaffer, looking at Victor in the same way that a butcher might look at a carcass. “Is he?”
    “And he wants to know how things work!” said Silverfish.
    Gaffer gave Victor another jaundiced look.
    “String,” he said gloomily. “It all works by string. You’d be amazed how things’d fall to bits around here,” he said, “if it weren’t for me and my ball of string.”
    There was a sudden commotion from the box around his neck. He thumped it with the flat of his hand.
    “You lot can cut that out,” he said. He nodded at Victor.
    “They gets fractious if their routine is upset,” he said.
    “What’s in the box?” said Victor.
    Gaffer winked at Silverfish. “I bet you’d like to know,” he said.
    Victor remembered the caged things he’d seen in the shed.
    “They sound like common demons,” he said cautiously.
    Gaffer gave him an approving look, such as might be given to a stupid dog who had just done a rather clever trick.
    “Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded.
    “But how do you stop them escaping?” said Victor.
    Gaffer leered. “Amazin’ stuff, string,” he said.

    Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was one of those rare people with the ability to think in straight lines.
    Most people think in curves and zig-zags. For example, they start from a thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what’s for supper, and: I wonder who I know who can lend me five dollars?
    Whereas Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich , draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.
    Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the